Psybertron Asks

Dawkins’ Hyper-Rationalism – Posted an essay on this subject after recently reading Dawkins’ “A Devil’s Chaplain”. Methinks the Charles Simonyi professor, for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, doth protest too much when he attacks lack of knowledge with scientific rationale alone.

Rorty and Dennett on Knowledge Board aggregator. Interesting opinions about Rorty and Dennett in connection with Darwinian Evolution, Post-Modernism and Nietzsche amongst other things, from Paul Kelly’s blog – “as we know it”. And here was I thinking I was the only one following this philosophical line of investigation in Knowledge Management blogging. I get the impression that this writer also takes the view that disagreement between philosophies does not justify one attacking the other. There is a lot of grey between binary opposites. As I blogged in the last couple of weeks I’m having unexpected problems with Dawkins and Rorty, but currently enjoying Nietzsche.

Paul has this category [Quote] – Selection Theory – aka evolutionary epistemology, holds that evolution is a knowledge process. Knowledge, whether in the form of biological adaptation or cultural innovation, proceeds by the Darwinian dynamic of trial and error, blind variation and selective retention, conjecture and refutation, etc. [Unquote] Spot on. I might perhaps add the implied converse, that knowledge is an evolutionary process too. Re-inforces the idea that truth (in a strictly scientific sense) is quite different from knowledge.

Categorisation of Posts – I wonder of BloggerPro is going to support this Moveable Type based categorisation of posts, also like Drupal I understand.

LinkBack Referrer SystemMust try this, along with blogroll too.

Feedster Search Engine for Aggregated RSS Feeds. Was originally called Roogle apparently. [via nycsmith]
AAAAGGGHHH!!! – Feedster appears to have completely swamped the Knowledge Board aggregator (see previous blog). I expressed some concerns earlier about the incestuous nature of feeds, subscriptions and trackbacks exploding into multiple links and, even worse, circular links. My link to you creates a link to me creates a link to you ….. etc.

New K-Blog RSS Aggregator on-line at Knowledge Board. Interesting new addition to the Knowledge Board KM WebLogging community created by Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledynamics.

This is very good – dead simple, but excellent. I do already use RSS, but the teledynamics page combining the various Knowledge Blogs is a really useful idea. I shall have to watch my P’s and Q’s if my feed is going direct to this page (!) I only put my headline and the link in my RSS feed, (and not the content as some others do) so people can choose to go and read or not, depending on the headline, rather than bulk up the aggregated page with masses of text.

If multiple people find this aggregator useful, it might become an excellent place to experiment with tagging conventions to classify links and content according to subject, purpose, content etc …. Whaddya think Seb ?

The Great Separation – Weird but intriguing site this – includes a blog of sorts updated during 2002 and most recently in Jan 2003. Currently a triumph of flash design over content – very post-modern, but hints at considerable promise.

Counting Sheep – Didn’t I just read this in Dawkins, talking about big numbers – Blind Watchmaker wasn’t it ? Spookily, Disenchanted (linked to Qubits) relates quantum cryptography to intuitive “folk” view of large numbers. What would Dawkins think of it, I wonder ? (In Devils’ Chaplain he rolls current Quantum “hype” into the unscientific / mystic pot.)